“Pokemon Trading Card Game Classic” To Be Most Expensive Pokemon TCG Product Ever Sold in Stores

By: Water Pokémon Master · Posted Posted onSep 21, 2023 at 8:14 AM · 50 Comments

The Pokemon Trading Card Game Classic will release on November 17th in English!

It will retail for a whopping $399.99, making it the most expensive Pokemon TCG product ever released in stores. Preorders just launched on the Pokemon Center. It will also be sold at local hobby stores.

We’ve also learned the product will be sold at GameStop stores on November 3rd, which is two weeks before the November 17th date. It will retail there for the same price. GameStop has yet to officially announce this, so details could change.

TPCi has also announced, “The unique cards from [Classic] will be made available in a separate product coming in February 2024.” Presumably this means you can get just the cards for a cheaper price — without the box’s accessories — but this is speculation.

In Japan, Classic will release sometime in October for 35,000 yen (about $240). We’re not sure why the English version will cost $160 more. Perhaps this is because TPCi knows the product will be in high demand and wants it to be perceived as a premium product. (We first learned about the $400 price a few months ago, but didn’t report on it because we thought it was listed in error.)

Check out my report on Pokemon Trading Card Game Classic for hands-on photos and details. As posted before, Classic will feature three 60-card decks headlined by Base Set Venusaur, Charizard, and Blastoise. All 180 cards will be holo.

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This product is confused about its own identity.

It's presented as a boardgame style self-contained format that you play (given that it comes with play pieces and I'm pretty sure that none of the cards are tournament legal), but it's so expensive that I wouldn't be surprised if 99% of the copies bought are never actually played with or even opened and are just bought for collection. This kind of product should have been priced like the Battle Academies, which are literally the same thing minus the nostalgia and some of the cards from that being tournament legal (even if they're not competitively viable). This does have some fancier items than the Academy I guess, but that shouldn't be a $300+ markup.
 
Pretty disappointing that there isn't going to be an option to buy the board and accessories separately, because I honestly couldn't care less about the weird decks. I hope that they're at least relatively affordable secondhand because they do really look quite nice. Also that pricing is obviously ridiculous blehh
 
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They could have easily priced it at $100 and printed a bunch of these. They know exactly what they're doing - this isn't a product for you, this is for FOMO investors to buy out the entire stock and resell them on ebay for an even higher price. An actual pump & dump.
Meanwhile, if you actually want to relive the nostalgia of Base Set, I have a set to show ya. :3
 
$400 and the scalpers still sold out preorders within an hour of listing. Hope they eat dirt hard on this release.

The only good thing about this announcement is that they said straight-up that the new unique cards in Classic will be released in a different product in February. k bye I don't want this $400 trash anyway!
 
The price is nuts, still going to get one though, I had heard about the price about a month or so back and already decided to commit to getting one. That is, assuming I can find one for this particular price in my country.
 
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